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Sunday, December 02, 2012

Tyler Cowen has a nice article on the Euro situation in the NYT. He outlines both the many reasons for pessimism and the rather fewer for optimism (it has crashed yet). I also think he has most of the bottom line right:

Still, we shouldn’t forget that a solution exists. In essence, the required debt write-down is a large check lying on the table waiting to be picked up. No one knows how costly it is, but estimates have ranged from the hundreds of billions to the trillions of dollars. It need only be decided how to divide the bill. The reality is this: The longer that the major players wait, the larger that bill will grow. That they’ve yet to split the check is the worst news of all.

I would just add that it's not necessarily just a one time check and that the austerity path to wage adjustment is highly destructive.